I don’t think I understand what exactly you consider unproductive. I tried to implement many of your suggestions and tried to give reasons for not following others in my response Divergent transitions - a primer - #6 by martinmodrak . You didn’t follow-up on my response (which you have every right to do), but I honestly don’t know how to make a conversation much more productive than that. What was the reason you decided to end the conversation at that point?
In any case I believe that among all possible combinations of words we can display to a user who tries to understand divergences there is a hypothetical global optimum that would help the most users make a useful next step in their analysis and/or understanding of Bayesian methods. I also think it is clear that either showing nothing or just “read a statistics textbook and then come back” we are far from this optimum. Similarly we would IMHO clearly be far from the optimum if the resource became a statistics textbook of its own. There are also bounds on how much time and energy can be invested in writing. So I tried to strike a middle ground. It is quite possible that I failed at it. If you have any suggestions how to move towards a text that would be closer to such global optimum (including replacing the text with something completely different), I’d be glad to hear them and will try incorporate them (or, you can directly edit the post yourself).
The howto says in the introduction (this was included in August 2020 as a part of response towards your feedback):
We should note that resolving modelling issues is generally hard and requires some understanding of probabilistic theory and Hamiltonian Monte-Carlo, see Understanding basics of Bayesian statistics and modelling for more general resources.
and later
What follows is a list of brief hints that could help you diagnose the source of degeneracies in your model - or at least let you get faster help here on forums. Where they exist, we link to additional resources for deeper understanding. The aim is to provide a birds-eye view of approaches we’ve had success with in the past, point you to additional resources and give you keywords to search for :-) This is not, and can’t be a definitive guide - each degenerate posterior is problematic in its own way and there is no single approach that would always work.
If you fail to diagnose/resolve the problem yourself or if you have trouble understanding or applying some of the hints, don’t worry, you are welcome to ask here on Discourse, we’ll try to help!
Do you believe we should give even more warnings of the incomplete nature of the resource?